Impatient Americans may have to get used to waiting if the sequester kicks in next week.

Air travelers, truckers and anyone waiting for goods to be shipped from overseas could face lengthy delays as a result of the automatic spending cuts, federal agencies and some industry groups are warning.

President Barack Obama has been talking up the sequester’s impact on everyday Americans, seeking to pressure lawmakers to stave off the $85 billion in cuts set to begin March 1.

“It’s to their benefit to talk about delays and ‘this is going to get cut’ and ‘that is going to cut,’ to get the American people behind them,” Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) said last week. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) went even further this week, accusing Obama of engaging in “histrionics.”

But Roger Dow, who leads the U.S. Travel Association, warned that travel could very likely become the poster child of sequestration. He called on Congress to avert what he anticipates would be a transportation disaster.

“These across-the-board cuts may punish travelers with flight delays, long security lines at Transportation Security Agency checkpoints and multi-hour waits to clear Customs and Border Protection,” Dow said. "There is absolutely no excuse for travelers in one of the world's most advanced nations to suffer through a travel process that wastes their precious time and resources.”

Here are some of the ways sequestration could snarl major parts of the transportation network:

Air traffic controllers

The sequester will almost certainly mean longer waits for passengers at airports, not only in the security lines but also at gates or on the tarmac.

The $600 million in cuts set to hit the FAA would result in unpaid furloughs for nearly all of the agency’s nearly 47,000 employees, including air-traffic controllers. In turn, the number of flights would need to be reduced to a level that can be safely managed.

“Sequestration could slow air traffic levels in major cities, which will result in delays and disruptions across the country during the critical summer travel season,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wrote in a Feb. 11 letter to Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.).

LaHood said FAA employees would be furloughed for one day per pay period, or every two weeks, through September. The maximum time-off would be two furlough days per period.

But he provided an important caveat: The number of furlough days could be lower depending on “staffing needs, operational requirements, and negotiated collective bargaining agreements.”

For now, labor unions and airline industry officials aren’t taking sides, being careful not to engage in the Washington blame game. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association had no immediate comment but said it will release a report next week on the impacts of the sequester.

“It's premature to speculate on actual impacts,” said Victoria Day, a spokeswoman for Airlines for America, the major trade group for the airline industry.

Transportation Security Administration

One of the most tangible effects of the cuts will be in airport screening lines. While the TSA wouldn’t have to cut staffing levels immediately after the March 1 deadline, wait times would go up and lines would get longer down the road.

The agency wouldn’t be able to fill jobs opened through natural attrition, like retirements, and would be forced to cut overtime for current screeners. TSA is planning on a hiring freeze on March 1 if the sequester occursand could furlough its 50,000 screeners for up to seven days, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently told the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Her letter to the panel put it bluntly, saying the reduced workforce “would substantially increase passenger wait times at airport security checkpoints.”

Politicians around the country have seized on the issue as one that’s easy to explain to outside-the-Beltway types — the kind of people who would normally blink twice at terms like “sequestration.”

“Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country,” Obama said Tuesday. Hours earlier, former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles had said news stories about the automatic cuts — including about airport wait lines — could spur action.

“When you guys have to go out here to Reagan Airport and wait in line three hours to get through security, you’re going to be pissed,” Bowles said during a POLITICO Playbook policy breakfast.

Despite Bowles’s catchy quote, nobody has offered any official estimates of how much wait times would increase at specific airports.

Highway Trust Fund

The fund that pays for road, bridge and transit projects also wouldn’t escape the sequester entirely unharmed, though the impact on motorists would take place more gradually.

Trust fund spending on roads, bridges and transit systems is exempt from the automatic cuts. LaHood’s letter says the fund, motor carrier safety programs and routine transit grants would be safe from the cuts and “continue to operate at current funding levels.”

But while the gas tax dollars that go into the trust fund aren’t on the chopping block, the billions of general taxpayer dollars that keep the fund afloat are subject to the sequester.

Last year’s transportation law transferred nearly $19 billion from Treasury’s coffers into the Highway Trust Fund. The bulk of that money — $12.6 billion — will flow in the next fiscal year and could be cut if the sequester kicks in.

The fund is already projected to run dry in 2015, but the bankruptcy could come a bit sooner under sequestration.

With the federal government spending more than $50 billion on road and transit projects each year, the sequester’s impact is a relative drop in the bucket. But every drop counts, as states face funding crunches of their own. So projects aimed at widening highways and otherwise clearing traffic bottlenecks would eventually feel the squeeze.

Customs and Border Protection

Wait times would also be longer for folks leaving and returning to the United States as well as businesses transporting goods through land and sea ports like Laredo, Texas, Long Beach, Calif., and Charleston, S.C.

Facing more than $500 billion in cuts, Customs and Border Protection — the agency responsible for ensuring the safety of shipments — would be forced to furlough employees, cut overtime for workers on the front lines and decrease hiring, Napolitano told lawmakers. And starting April 1, CBP would have to cut its work hours the equivalent of more than 5,000 Border Patrol agents and 2,750 CBP officers.

The cutbacks could slow the transport of more than 11 million shipping containers that arrive at U.S. seaports each year, Homeland Security officials said. Another 11 million arrive by truck and could face as much as five-hour waits at border crossings.

“The motto down here is time is money. You have to keep that traffic moving through the bridges — it will cost you money if it’s delayed,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), whose district includes the land port of Laredo, told POLITICO on Wednesday. “If you’re stuck there for hours and hours, you’re not going to be making money.”

At international airports, the time it takes to clear customs would increase by 50 percent or more. Waits at the nation’s busiest airports like Los Angeles International, JFK and Chicago O’Hare are already more than two hours — and they could increase to four hours or more, Napolitano said.

“Such delays would not only cause thousands of missed passenger connections,” the secretary said, “they would have severe economic consequences at local and national levels.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:32 p.m. on February 20, 2013.